BHEKILIZWE BERNARD NDLOVU
John’s journey of value formation stretches back to his childhood in his relationship with his mother and father at home. He was a curious child as most children are before adulthood happens and they have to check their moves. He was so clever that his parents always had to check his moves and watch his mouth whenever they got visitors in case he said and did things that would leave them embarrassed in the village get the bad reputation that they were bad parents whose children had no manners.
At first John just took risks and said stuff and would get a menacing pout from his mother as a warning that she would deal with him when the visitors left. She knew she would be considered disrespectful to the visitors if she disciplined her child in the presence of the visitors and so John would take advantage of this when his young brain realised that his mother was restrained. He would do it even more when his maternal granny was around as a visitor because granny was his mother’s mother and would quickly reprimand his mother if she dared punish John in her presence, after all, John ‘was only a child and there was no need to be too harsh on him,’ granny would say, much to John’s excitement. He would still get that warning pout to say, ‘you will see me when granny leaves. Poor John.
You will see already under what circumstances John’s value system was formed, under strict conditions with codes of conduct that were not written down and under very ‘legalistic’ conditions. As John tried to be himself and really express himself, he found detours in the form of his mother and father that stopped him and made him wonder why these adults were so difficult. After all, he only wanted to be himself, to play, to dance, to say whatever he wanted to say without any inhibitors. Jonah Lake’s song, Don’t grow up, it’s a trap would have rung in his little head had he been old enough to decipher. These adults he loved so much and loved to please were to become the representatives of the rest of the people he would meet later in life.
His parents were to become his rehearsal space for his values and behaviour. He had to sit there and decide how to behave, wanting to belong and be loved by these people, his father, and his mother and yet he wanting to love himself and do things that made him deeply happy. It was not easy to strike a balance between these two needs, the need to love himself, fully express himself and at the same time be loved and accepted by his parents.
He realised as he grew older that his parents indeed represented the world and that he was going to need to be a careful schemer in life to be ‘happy.’ That ‘happiness’ would not be a stroll in the park and needed a dance between his inner needs and the restrictions of his father and mother, and later fellow human beings who ‘prescribed’ sometimes indirectly how he needed to behave to be accepted and be happy. It all started with the parents, and this should have been the reason why Scott Peck, the writer of the book, The Road Less Travelled has a whole chapter called The Sins of the Father that explores this subject at length to show how parents clip our wings when they begin to grow and only let us free when we cannot fly.
Sadly, most parents have no school of parenting to go to and learn about all these things. How not to kill the creativity of a child and how to nurture it so that their value system is formed in truth and creativity in preparation for life, and in our case for this article, for the workplace. We have ‘kids’ arriving in the workplace, featherless, falling in the hands of managers who expect them to fly and perform.
The inside cry of wanting to fly and wanting to touch the sky never dies. He just had to suppress it but still think about it. As he grew older it somehow felt normal that he couldn’t be himself and he even used it against others also, to stop them from being themselves and really touching the sky and flying. He found that the manager in the workplace presented a similar environment where again he wished he could just fly but realised he needed to be careful.
- Chamisa under fire over US$120K donation
- Mavhunga puts DeMbare into Chibuku quarterfinals
- Pension funds bet on Cabora Bassa oilfields
- Councils defy govt fire tender directive
Keep Reading
When John was young he saw his sister break a mug and get a couple of lashes from his very ‘strict’ mother and when he broke a mug himself later one day he decided to hide it and never report that he had done so to his mother. This was to become a value for him; you had to protect yourself from pain by being dishonest and it was not wrong because after all one had to avoid pain.
That is why later in the workplace as a salesman, when John lost his daily sales of two hundred dollars that he was supposed to bank on the same day according to the rules, he decided not to report the case to his supervisor but run around looking for the money to pay back without reporting the case. When his supervisor discovered what John had done three days later, he fired him. Was John right to be afraid to report this case to his boss? Remember he had not stolen the money but lost it. What would you have done if you were John’s supervisor? Would I be wrong to say that John’s mother had long gotten John fired by making John’s primary value formation environment one that inflicted pain and fear? I would write a story called ‘A salesman fired for hiding a mug’ oh no sorry, ‘A salesman fired for hiding the truth about lost money.’ Do you see the connection? This is the fate of most workers, coming from their homes as wounded children to perform in a workplace that has no clue what to do to tap the talent by helping them change their values that are generally driven by fear and the need to avoid punishment and pain.
The workplace is not a kindergarten school but has a lot of kindergartens crying for the freedom to fly but had their wings clipped by their loving parents who loved them but didn’t know what to do with their young and flapping wings that flapped too much for their comfort.
John Bradshaw’s book comes to mind; Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, and I would recommend this book to John.
This, I believe is a case for the need to revisit this important subject of values and excitedly deal with it with understanding and not just the need to do it.
Organisations that really want to shine and thrive holistically would do well to hire qualified personnel to do a thorough audit of their values and cultures and come up with organised and scientific processes to negotiate and redirect their values and cultures.
Once the value system is dealt with and there is a sense of ‘we are doing this as a collective,’ a lot is taken care of, and at the heart of all that is automatically taken care of is the culture.
When the culture is in place, happiness goes up and happiness pushes up productivity and profit and that’s what we are there for in the workplace.
- Bhekilizwe Bernard Ndlovu’s training is in human resources training, development and transformation, behavioural change, applied drama, personal mastery and mental fitness. He works for a South African organisation as a Learning and Development Specialist, while also doing a PhD with Wits University where he looks at violent strikes in the South African workplace as a researcher. Ndlovu worked as a human resources manager for a number of blue-chip companies in Zimbabwe and still takes keen interest in the affairs of people and performance management in Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on [email protected]
